That’s why we should apply the KonMari method to our digital marketing strategy.

What does Marie Kondo have to do with marketing?

Image: Web Summit – Sportsfile, CC BY 2.0

Marie Kondo and her tidying techniques have been popular for years but she’s recently gained an even bigger audience through Netflix’s Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. All of a sudden, many of us got obsessed with the art of tidying up.

We’ve realized that tidying up can be easier if you follow a structure. It can even become therapeutic by showing your appreciation to your belongings while sorting out what you really need in your life.

Once you try to follow this method even in just one drawer, you want more of this in your life. And that’s why it’s time to apply her techniques to our digital marketing strategies.

Creating a ‘pile’ of all your tactics

The first step to tidying up is to get a visual overview of all your things. In this case, it’s time to write down everything that is part of your digital marketing strategy.

Don’t just focus on words such as ‘content marketing’ and ‘social media marketing’. Try to narrow it down as much as possible.

This should help you see a holistic view of your digital marketing strategy and how each tactic is shaping your strategy. It can also help you spot (Read more...) that might be hurting your strategy.

Deciding what you need to keep

The next step has to do with decluttering. Once you visualize all the elements of your strategy, it’s time to decide what you really need to keep.

According to Marie Kondo, you can start clothes, books, miscellaneous items until you go to the ‘hardest’ decisions over objects of sentimental value. In this case, you can start with the ‘easiest’ decisions based on your current results.

If your blog posts are an important part of your digital strategy, for example, then it’s an easy decision to keep them. The same might apply, for example, to your SEO strategy and the plans to focus more on search traffic. If you have already decided that you want to spend more time on it, then it means that there may be an opportunity that you want to explore.

Now it’s time to be honest with yourself. Is there a tactic that didn’t work well but you’re still insisting on keeping it in your strategy? Is there something that you’re always planning to try out but you never do?

Also, is there a strategy that you keep investing money but you don’t get the desired ROI? For example, you might be active on Facebook, but there’s no real ROI for more than 6 months. You keep creating more ads to boost your reach and your traffic, but the results are still not where you’d like them to be. You know that “Facebook Ads can be effective” and that “you need to pay to play” but is it time to shift your priorities?

This is the hardest stage when you need to chat with your team about the priorities and which tactics you really need to focus on.

It might be hard to set some of these aside, but it’s always better to focus on what’s best for your business. Beware, you don’t need to change everything in one day. The idea is to be honest with yourself about what you need to keep.

Changing a mindset

The “KonMari” method is about changing your mindset to keep what ‘sparks joy’ in your life.

When it comes to marketing, we could say that the tip to “keep what brings you joy” could turn into “keep what makes your work easier”.

If search marketing is bringing you closer to your goals, then you should keep it. If Facebook marketing is only taking a big part of your budget without seeing the desired results, then maybe it’s time to set it aside. No, you don’t need to just set aside different tactics before testing them in different variations. But if you don’t have the time or the money to keep them going, then you can just change your focus on more successful tactics.

What we can learn from the “KonMari” method is that the more we’re getting rid of tactics that are not working, the easier it will be to “tidy up” our strategy.

All we want is to make sure that we’re maintaining a successful digital marketing strategy.